Goldberg Variations

Elizabeth Anderson - Harpsichord

In 1996 Anderson’s CD of Bach's monumental Goldberg Variations received critical acclaim in the Australian press. The CD won a Listener's Choice award from Soundscapes magazine, and appeared in The Age newspaper's top 10 new CDs for that year. She went on to perform the Goldbergs in Schloß Friedrichsfeld, Berlin, the Carouge Spring Festival, Geneva, The Sorø International Music Festival, Denmark, the Vienna Bach Week, the Melbourne Bach Week, the Castlemaine State Festival and in concert series in Hamburg, Limburg, Sydney, Brisbane, Canberra and Newcastle.

Reviews

The Age (Melbourne)

Elizabeth Anderson’s Goldberg variations are an event. Like a knowledgeable, enthusiastic guide, Anderson lovingly shepherds the listener across the huge musical canvas . . . one of the great beauties of this reading is the player’s respect for the harpsichord as a plucked string instrument. After 93 minutes of engrossing music, it’s hard to come back to earth.

Soundscapes (Sydney)

Goldberg Variations . . . Her performance is one of sustained excellence: thoughtful, witty and admirably dexterous. Many harpsichordists flag in the course of the great Variation 25 (Landowska’s black pearl), but it holds no terrors for Anderson, whose intense reading is gripping from start to finish. Elizabeth Anderson has delivered what the Goldbergs title page promised: ‘refreshment of the spirit’. Andrew O’Connor

Dagbladet (Denmark)

Last night, before the Australian harpsichordist Elizabeth Anderson approached the harpsichord of Sorø Klosterkirke to play Bach’s Goldberg Variations, she definitively refuted the myth that the Variations were composed as a remedy for Count Carl von Kayserlink’s insomnia. - NO, she explained, they are - as Bach himself writes in his preface - to the glory of God, and for the refreshment of the spirit. After which she proceeded with the beautiful Aria and the following 30 Variations, in which it is not the melody itself, but its bass line, which forms the foundation.

After listening to her brilliant interpretation, the hour and a quarter the Variations takes, one must admit that they really are a very poor cure for insomnia.